Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

Lucinda curled two fingers down to flesh the ghostlike song with her bass line. The complainer began to bark out the song’s first lyrics, Matthew’s opening lines, only in a garbled and deranged form. “Better conceal yourself from the light, oooh, my little pumpkin…there are things that come out at night, and they come out galumphing…um, I’m the one who’ll always cut you down to size…ah, excavating your flaws with my monstrous eyes, wow…” The microphone Morsel had set on the floor was well placed, capturing the complainer’s every hissed sibilant.

“Wait, wait—” Denise quit the beat, so the music unspooled, Bedwin’s chords reduced to choppy nonsense. “Carl, what are you doing?”

“Well—”

“That’s Matthew’s part. And you’re singing it wrong.”

“I’m improvising.” Flat on the floor as if gazing at clouds, the complainer remained blithe. It was as though they were trying to wake a dreamer, demanding he rise and walk. Or maybe the rest of them, destroying their chances on live radio, late for the party that was meant to be their lives, gone to school without pants, were the dreamers.

“You can’t do that now,” said Denise.

“It’s my song,” he said. “Matthew can sing it with me.”

“It’s not your song. You didn’t even write those lyrics, Lucinda did.”

The shadowy form on the far side of the glass made itself apparent. Dr. Marian. All in black up to her turtleneck collar, she seemed a floating array of white hands and face and skunk’s hair-streak, a dervish of authority. Mick Felsh had been banished from the control room. Now she confronted Jules Harvey. Startled from his pheremonal intoxication, he didn’t stand a chance. The bright disks of his glasses lenses bobbed as he nodded in reply to Dr. Marian’s rebuke. Dr. Marian pointed to the door, making his sole option apparent. Morsel returned to fiddling dials, looking somewhat chagrined, her paleness flawed with color high in her cheeks and at her throat.

“Let’s try again,” said Lucinda hopelessly. “Matthew, maybe if you just sing—”

Denise ticked at her drum again, daring them to follow. Lucinda thrummed the bass figure. Rhodes Bramlett nodded approval. He, at least, was undiscouraged. Bedwin, though, had cinched both feet on the lip of his chair, knees twinned as though to protect his guitar from attack. Autumnbreast’s voice was conspicuous in its absence now, and no sign, encouraging or otherwise, came from Morsel.

“Carl, will you promise not to come in before Matthew?” said Denise.

“I promise to embrace the song and everything I feel, and everything you feel, too.” He lay immobile, his belly rising and falling with his breath. His voice filled the room, seeming endless, self-sustaining, horrible, the same voice that had once blazed its trail inside Lucinda, across Falmouth’s complaint line. Now she seemed to behold it from a million miles away, as if a comet in her sky, tail shedding interstellar slush and gravel in the guise of heat and light, now passed through to some other, colder night. “Maybe we should sing it a cappella,” he continued. “Or recite it like a one-act play, which might help bring out the drama in the words—”

Dr. Marian came through the door and stood spotlit in the band’s midst. Her prowlike chest and chin, her front-heavy bun of hair, nearly a pompadour, her flashing, careworn eyes, all demanded their absolute attention. Even Rhodes Bramlett scrambled to his feet, as though already under indictment. Dr. Marian only scowled at Bramlett once, and waved him to the exit. He slinked off.

“Mr. Plangent,” Dr. Marian said. “Ms. Hoekke.”

No one spoke.

“I begin to see the problem.”

“You do?” said Lucinda.

“It’s unmistakable. Mr. Vogelsong—am I saying that right?”

“That’s my name. Who are you?”

“That’s not important right now. May I see you outside, Mr. Vogelsong?”

The complainer was silent. No one rescued him from the cooling clarity of Dr. Marian’s request. He flounced on the tiles, his white hair sloppy, his posture poor even lying on his back, taking up uncommon amounts of space and air. Dr. Marian stood, bulletlike, arms crossed under her breasts, Monitor challenging Merrimac .

“Do I have to?” he said at last.

“Yes. You’ve come to an end here, Mr. Vogelsong.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You’re a hard woman to refuse.” A certain lascivious quality flickered in his tone, pointlessly. He batted his lids at her, upside down.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t know me that well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She pointed at the door.

He giggled, feebly.

Dr. Marian was less the band’s new manager than a figure of death, it seemed to Lucinda. The complainer had invoked the word and she’d come in black to collect him. Now he squirmed onto his stomach and crawled from amid the band’s equipment, making a path around Matthew’s mike stand. Dr. Marian held open the rubber-sealed door. The complainer remained on all fours, his expression that of a supplicant. She offered a curt nod as he passed over the threshold and continued down the corridor, padding along the carpet beneath rows of framed photographs of local luminaries. Dr. Marian went after him with a crisp air of unfinished business. The door sealed behind her.

The room was restored to silence, underlined by the ambient hum of their amplified unplayed guitars. Morsel sat silent, framed at her console in the control room. She met them with a level, not-unfriendly gaze. Matthew coughed resoundingly, his back to the others. The coils of Denise’s snare rattled in sympathy with the cough. Lucinda swayed hips and instrument rightward, filling some of the space the complainer had vacated. She imagined she could sense the warmth of the complainer’s absented weight through the soles of her sneakers, but it was surely only foolish imagination. Even if so, it was felt only by her. It was otherwise as if they’d come to this room without him. They made a foursome again, a band utterly changed by having accommodated the complainer, having binged on his lyrics and his apartment, yet, embarrassingly, still themselves: Denise, fixed at her set, emanating resolve; Bedwin, clinging to his instrument’s neck for solace; Matthew, infinitely damaged and proud, without even a guitar to disguise his singer’s fear of irrelevance; Lucinda, negotiating between, medium for the band’s yearning and confusion, their betrayer and fool, their bass player. Denise now stirred them with a beat, metronomically clean. Lucinda fitted her bass notes around the drum’s tick. Bedwin joined too, his chords a perfect emanation from his hiding place, his nerd’s gauze of self. There was only a held breath at the point when Matthew ought to have come in and didn’t. The singer stood making himself ready, seeming to weigh the band and the song with his shoulders. They bypassed him to play an instrumental verse, an overture. He met the song at the second pass. Lucinda had never heard him sing this way. She thought she heard a measure of the complainer’s tormented yawp in his approach, as though he’d subsumed Carl’s voice in his own. It didn’t matter. It was the best they ever played.

Morsel tiptoed out when no one was looking, so when they finished they were entirely alone. Autumnbreast didn’t speak if he was listening. It was hard to believe he’d heard. No one congratulated them, no one was on the line, no one had broadcast or bootlegged their small, enraptured song. They waited in the booth in dumb embarrassment until Morsel reappeared. She offered them release forms, which they signed without reading.

“We weren’t on the radio, were we?”

“Just the first part of the interview,” said Morsel. “After that the station went to a cart, a prerecorded feature on Mr. Autumnbreast’s charitable work with rescued greyhounds who worked at racetracks, including his own companion animal, Verve.”